Lowering Telephone Fees
Modern telephone plans (cellular or landline) vary widely in terms of their fee structures, which charge for voice, data, and SMS use according to various schemes. Some plans allow unlimited voice usage, or charge a flat rate for all voice calls, or charge for voice calls only after a certain number of minutes are used in a given month, and/or charge according to which provider is being called (sometimes with discounts for calls within the same carrier). Similarly, data plans can be unlimited, or charged at a flat rate, or charged only after a certain amount of data has been transferred within a certain time frame. Similar billing plans are common for SMS usage. Some telephone service providers may also levy per-minute charges on incoming calls and/or outgoing calls, and still other forms of billing are known.
There is thus much value in devising a system and method to enable automated optimization of call placement that can utilize information about billing plans to lower costs to users.
The Problem with Standard Phone Session Initiation
When a caller calls a receiving party, the caller, it may be averred, is in effect expressing a desire to speak to the receiving party for the period of time during which the recipient's phone rings. In that limited period of time the receiver is obliged to make a decision (provided the receiver is aware of the phone ring) with the following choices: to answer; to abort the call by hanging up after raising the line; for the case of mobile phones, actively rejecting the call; to ignore the call by allowing the rings to continue until they stop (when either caller hangs up or the call gets timed out by the telephony system, ignoring may be accompanied by muting the ringer); or to turn off or unplug the phone altogether. This process is pressured by time-limit since the receiving party must respond in a limited amount of time (if he is to answer). The process is also in a sense synchronous since the receiving party must respond during and within the time of the phone's ringing.
This reality of time-limited synchronous call initiation holds no matter whether the receiving party sets his phone to mute, ringtone, vibrate, a single “beep” or the like. Moreover, during a call initiation event, both parties' telephones are temporarily dedicated to the call event, meaning they cannot at this time call other recipients or receive other calls. If the receiving party hangs up, the caller gets an indication that the receiver is there and has decided to hang up on the caller. If the receiving party does not answer, it still indicates certain information. For instance if the receiving party is connected through cellular telephony, the caller may conclude that the receiving line is operating and in communication with the telephony system; is necessarily within range of a cell tower; and that the receiver is not currently talking (in another conversation). If the phone rings with a call-waiting signal then of course the caller knows that the receiver is in a conversation already. If the caller calls several times, a timeline can be constructed of the receiver's actions, comprising the times at which the receiving party is in active conversations and for what durations, times during which the line is active and inactive, and the like. The readiness with which this information may be gleaned by any third parties deprives the receiver of a crucial measure of privacy which may also be a social hazard. For instance, a party making several consecutive calls to another party, receiving for instance call waiting, and then cut off after several rings, will conclude that he is being screened by the receiving party.
Another stark disadvantage of the prevailing method of communications is the necessity on the part of the receiver—no matter how busy or preoccupied he may be—to respond in real time to incoming phone rings, regardless of the type of ring the receiver defines in his machine—be it a continuous ring, vibration, or even a single beep sound. The essence of current telecommunication is that there is a synchronous event we may call a “phone ring” with an associated time-out.
There is thus a further long felt need for systems and methods to allow for telephonic connection without the stress and attention demanded by conventional ‘synchronous’ connection procedures and the lack of privacy of current telephony systems.